Why Is It Important to Know That God Chose Us First?

John Piper

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including A Peculiar Glory.

Why do you believe it is so important to
understand that, in regards to salvation, God chose us first?

Because God means to get all the glory for our salvation. We need
to know the One on whom we're leaning and what we're really leaning on
him for. Let me say a word about each of these two things.

The second one: we need to know how we got saved. We were born not of
blood, not of man, not of the human will--we were born of God. That is,
we were brought into being as spiritually alive people by God. We were
dead, according to Ephesians 2, and now we are alive together with
God--by grace we have been saved.

Grace is the sovereign work by
which God speaks to the dead corpse of our own spiritual life, and
says, "Lazarus, come forth," and we awake from the dead, or "John
Piper, come forth!," and we are brought into being. We need to
know that so that we can rest in God's sovereign saving of us. That's
how we got saved! We didn't somehow raise ourselves from the dead. We
didn't somehow create--out of nothing--spiritual affections. God did
this for us, which leads now to the first thing: he means to be
glorified for all of this.

God wants to be acknowledged for all that he has done and for all that
he is. We will not give him all of the praise and glory that
he should get if we don't acknowledge what he has done for us. So I
think it is really important that we teach people how they actually got
saved, even if they don't fully understand how they got saved, because
we want them to begin--now better than never--praising and honoring
and relying on God for all that he did and not just for part of it.